YouTube Scores Huge Victory in Copyright Case

yeah....let's all shoot the messenger...

not to mention sue gun and weapons manufacturer for murder, McDs for making kids fat, and God for pedophile priests...

I still hold a grudge with viacom for bringing us MTV.

Finally a win for us, and not a win for the people who sue their own consumers.

Blaming Youtube for allowing copyright infringement is a bit like blaming WalMart for shoplifting.

Yay!

Seems to me that the owners of the copyright should be policing the inter webs to find their illegal copies of their material...

...which is exactly what Viacom did, and they notified YouTube, and YouTube removed the videos the next day...

... so I fail the see what the issue is.

A dyslexic man walked into a bra.

"mere knowledge of the prevalence of (copyright violations) in general is not enough"

Seems like this is a reasonable statement. Youtube does comply with removing things when requested. They do not tell the user to upload copyrighted videos. Simply lacking the man-power to remove all of them on a daily basis is not willful intent to infringe upon the copyright.

In most cases with intellectual property, it's the intellectual property's owner that's responsibility to protect that property. If you come out with the copyright "windows" then its your job to make sure no one else tries to sell their products with your name. The court will back you up. But if you don't care about your name, you can not take them to court. There are no "intellectual property police" that go around issuing "cease and desist" letters and charge people for using other people's intellectual property. That's the responsibility of the intellectual property holder. If they issue the complaint, youtube is and has been compliant with removing said issues.

Expecting more from youtube is like selling paper to someone and then being held liable for what someone printed or wrote on that piece of paper.

Money grabbing @!$*^$*%(*&(&!!!
but it's good to know that there is still some justice left in this world !!!

Okay, so YouTube hosting copyright material is legal, yet TPB and MiniNova hosting copyright material is illegal? Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

I seem to recall there being a lot more to this story a year or two ago, something about how Youtube/Google actually had records showing Viacom themselves had uploaded some of the videos in question to Youtube. Anyway, glad to hear the Internets won this one!

Once I uploaded a video of Valve's "Meet the team" promos for Team Fortress 2. It got taken down due to a Viacom copyright claim. I appealed, remarking that those trailers are property of Valve and giving links proving it. My video was allowed then =)

So the copyright holder makes a claim and the infringing content is then promptly removed. Yet the entity that was informed of the infringment and took action is still somehow liable? WTF

money

"This is an important victory not just for us, but also for the billions of people around the world who use the web to communicate and share experiences with each other,"

How exactly does this affect "billions" of people?
Last time I checked, Youtube was not available in many countries outside the U.S. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but U.S. law is "U.S." law, not "World Law". Court decisions, landmark or otherwise, made in the United States don't affect law in other countries, especially since most of the world uses civil law as opposed to the U.S. which uses common law.

well when mommy does not give you want you want, go to daddy.

viacom, here is the finger you want....

Ah-ha screw you Viacom, no one likes you anyways.

"How exactly does this affect "billions" of people?
Last time I checked, Youtube was not available in many countries outside the U.S. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but U.S. law is "U.S." law, not "World Law". Court decisions, landmark or otherwise, made in the United States don't affect law in other countries, especially since most of the world uses civil law as opposed to the U.S. which uses common law."


Wow....since you are obviously too stupid to figure it our for yourself, I'll spell it out for you.

Youtube is available in most countries. In fact so many countries, that billions of people have access to it.
http://mashable.com/2007/05/30/youtube-bans/

Also, when youtube is forced to take down one video by an american company (citing american law), then nobody can watch this video. Even those outside of america. So yes, american law can affect the rest of the world.

@"users posting clips that infringe on Viacom copyrights"
...similar, then please remind me why "Pirate Bay" was sued (and lost)..?!

To all you people wondering why entities like Pirate Bay are successfully sued.

I've never used one of those sites, but from what I understand they exist almost exclusively to share copyrighted material. Yes, you can share your kid's fourth birthday party, but no one does. The lion's share of content on pirate sites is copyrighted material.

YouTube credibly makes the argument that it's purpose is to share users' personal videos and that copyrighted videos are an anomaly. YouTube also expediently complies with requests to take down copyrighted videos, whereas I suspect most pirate sites don't. (Do those sites even have procedures to get copyrighted material removed?)

Most importantly, Google has more money than it knows what to do with. Therefore, they can hire way better lawyers than any of those pirate sites.

I really don't get Viacom (well actually I do) They are suing the service that gives them shit loads of free advertising for their products, movie clips, songs ect. nearly all artists have an official page now and upload their own music video's to it.

Viacom are just greed, they know google make money through advertising on Youtube and they are not getting any of it, I really hope that court case cost Viacom Millions, and surely hope tehy get told to FO on appeal...

Not really. After all, Walmart is the holder of the property and the victim of the crime. Youtube does not own the stolen videos, and thus are not suffer a loss when an infringement occurs. Now, make it so all manufacturers have to pay a buy-back credit to missing/stolen merchandise then your analogy might work.

----------------------------------------------------

In general, to those who think this is a victory, we all know there are appeals. If appeals fail, then there will be the RIAA styled alternative - demand Youtube (like ISPs) hand out settlement warning notifiers to all their "suspected" users who have violated to settle out of court for $3000-$5000 else be sued for millions by a well funded corporate legal team with resources that will bury them in court.

In other words, if they can't get the money they feel they would have gotten from Youtube, then they'll have to come after the violators... the users.

I hold Metallica responsible for increasing my urge to download music. No wait, it's the Internet. I'll sue that! Someone's responsible for my actions! It ain't me, I swear!

It's a shame that most people seem to have missed what this is about. For example, most parties I go to there is always someone loading up tunes on youtube on request so that everyone is listening to and sharing the latest tracks they're into. 7-8 years ago, it was a TV that was playing the latest songs from the music channels. This is all about organised media gradually losing the ability to spoon-feed us what they want us to hear and rape the advertising revenues because of the strength of youtube. If I want to see a music video, listen to a song, see a videogame trailer - I always head to Youtube and millions of others do too. This is *not* a legitimate legal complaint as (unlike Torrent sites) Youtube is not designed for sharing illegal content and complies quickly to remove it as per the DMCA. This is about seeking to sabotage a competitor to give content control back to media conglomerates like Viacom. Epic Fail Viacom, Epic Fail...

Fuck you Viacom.

Also, people will imitate each other through any means, be it natural motion, video, music or phrases, no one is immune to being copied, but at least Google respects the will of the authors and removes it on notice.

But they're not hosting copyrighted material, just .torrent files related to them.

Therefore it's even more backwards; it's legal to host copyrighted material if you take it down on request, but essentially linking to copyrighted material is always illegal.

That's why some day people will get sued for posting YouTube links, not by YouTube, by the company who thinks it's their copyrighted material somewhere within the linked video.


It's good to see we do stand a chance against copyright fueled companies, but apparently it takes another big company to do it. Let's face it, the legal system is becoming nothing but a pet to large companies.

Wasn't there a published email chain showing some of the people behind youtube actively seeking to get material covered by copyright onto the site? I can't remember exactly, but that's where any complaint should be targetted if it's true. E.g. if there was a push to disregard legal rights of others in order to boost the price the original owners could sell their shares for then those people should be targetted - the company in general being liable should be less likely if they've got some 'reasonable' measure in place, which it sounds like they do.

If the purpose of hosting the links is to facilitate an illegal action then that sounds likely to breach some law or other - you've got a good slab of mens rea if nothing else.
If you're providing a service that just happens to allow some people to breach the law, but you take all reasonable precautions to prevent them doing so / to undo the ill, that seems less wrong.
To me at least, maybe I just think backwards and you're right(?)

As I recall, there was more than enough evidence being put forth in this case that showed that not only was viacom totally blind about the facts of their own case but their companies were even using youtube to promote their "copyrighted" material in the form of video clips and partial (maybe full) episodes.

There is a double standard. It's only infringement when the poster isn't the owner yet there are plenty of posts by the owner and neither path providing proof of copyright or a release to rebroadcast but then expecting youtube to know the difference between what's legit and what's not.

I don't buy the "service for infringement" rule. A law is broken by the lawbreaker and no one else. Providing a service that has legitimate and legal use doesn't break any law even if the use of that service become mostly illegal use. The legal issues are still on the shoulders (or at least should be) on those who do the actual crime. If suddenly no one bought Ford trucks except those who transport drugs, is Ford suddenly a criminal corporation? No.

As for you doofs that always complain "it's U.S. law, not .." Try reading up on "International Copyright Law". Ever read the warning at the beginning/end of a movie?

Try this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyr [...] yright_law

So, while it may be that U.S. law isn't your law, there are still laws that apply equally to the U.S. and a lot of other countries too.

Personally I'm a believer, as I am a software developer, that infringement is between the owner and the infringer.

I have a saying "It's not an issue until it's an issue." In this case, if the copyright owner doesn't sue, then no one else cares about it... It's not an issue for anyone until it's an issue for them. Then you have to duck and cover. Until then, everyone else couldn't care less about it.

You mean "screwing up" MTV.